Discussion Board of Project “Free Scriptures”

Posts in this forum can't be a replacement for information which should be part of the project files! Some posts are still in German and will be translated or revised in the future. Beware: guest posts will be moderated! Last backup: 20140118T2107.

I want to give you a short overview about a free and open source web site that I created for studying the bible (http://strongs.de). The idea behind this project was to create a web site, where everyone is able to read the bible (until now only german bibles) and study them in a original context. That means that I wanted to give the opportunity to get more detailed information about the original text (greek or hebrew). Therefore I used the free german bible translations Elberfelder 1905 which has a strong number reference and connected these strong numbers with the original greek text (currently textus receptus) to give more detailed information about the greek word behind the german translation. To get these information you can click on a "strong-word" in the bible text. This will show up a sidebar with more informations, like the translation variants and grammatical information.

There are many features we plan to integrate, such as adding and sharing notes for example. The main goal of this website is to be free and open source available. So you can check out the source code at github: https://github.com/strongs-de/strongs

We have added some actual bible translations from the "Genfer Bibelgesellschaft" (NGÜ and Schlachter2000), which we cannot distribute due to licensing restrictions but we are allowed to show it freely on this website. The github repository only contains free bible translations. In this repository you find scripts to import Zefania XML and OSIS files into the internal database format.

I would be glad if there would be some developers contributing to this project, so if you are interested, head over to github and clone the repo.

Mirko, thanks for this notification and your general interest in the development of freely licensed Bible software. Unfortunately, you've picked Creative Commons BY, where all Creative Commons licenses are a pretty bad choice for licensing software. I strongly advise to relicense your software under GNU Affero General Public License 3 or any later version, because it would ensure that users can get the source code even if the software does run on a server, and its copyleft would prevent that derived versions can be restrictively licensed. Relicensing requires the permission of all contributors to your project, otherwise your and their work is likely to go in part to waste.

Regarding the Schlachter 2000 and Neue Genfer Übersetzung versions, you as many other website operators and the users of your website are victims of restrictive licensing, because you can't pass the permission you've got on to your users, nor can you change the translation or make other uses of it. By providing them anyway, you're adding to the impression that plenty of Bible texts are available where they aren't in fact. Hopefully we can change this mess soon and get rid of Schlachter 2000 and Neue Genfer Übersetzung, if they don't come in printed form or freely licensed.